Sheila Pistorius, the mother of Carl, Oscar, and Aimee, died decades ago when her children were still teenagers.
She unexpectedly fell ill at the age of 42 in early 2002 just after remarrying. Oscar has said that his mother was misdiagnosed with hepatitis and received the incorrect treatment.
Sheila was rushed to the hospital by friend Gillian Silcock when her condition hadn’t improved after a week. Her children were brought there on March 6, 2002.
“She'd had a brain haemorrhage at that point, but she didn’t go, she didn’t let go and go be with her dad in heaven until the boys got there... when her boys walked in they were able to see her and say goodbye and she waited, because after short period of time, 15 minutes or so, she went. After her sons arrived,” Silcock told eNCA.
Oscar has referred to lessons his mother imparted to him when she was alive, partly through the letters that she wrote to all three of her children.
Oscar shared one at the beginning of his autobiography, an excerpt from a letter that his mother wrote to him just five months after surgeons amputated both of his legs.
“The real loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last. The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete,” the excerpt said.
“She was a very strong... pivoting point in our lives. She really made the point of saying, ‘You know, if you want to do something go into it full heartedly... if you don’t succeed, you can say that really wasn’t for me, but you don’t have to have a regret at the end of the day.’ That was something that she really believed in,” Pistorius said in 2009.
“If you didn’t get involved, then you missed out, and if you tried something and you didn’t succeed in it, then you still achieved something in giving it a go.”
Oscar says he and his siblings were brought up to never say “I can’t.”
Oscar remembers his mother in various ways, including through the date of her death as a tattoo on his arm.
“She was very special to us. She was very cool; a very hectic, free spirit. She didn’t really comply with much and had a very carefree approach to life,” Pistorius elaborated to the Daily Mail before the London Olympics.
“She didn’t take anything too seriously. She wrote us hundreds of letters and taught us hundreds of things and never made decisions for us. ‘Those are important lessons, when you try to do things sometimes and you don’t succeed and you give up, and you never really know what the potential could have been if you had stayed dedicated to something.”
While it’s impossible to determine how Sheila would have reacted to the ongoing trial of her son, Silcock believes she knows.
“She would have continued to love, and I don’t think she would have stopped praying for God’s plan to continue in Oscar’s life. The world is negative and the world says that’s the end of everything. She wouldn’t have taken that view.”
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